Headshots: Roland WIP 2

When last I worked on Roland, I'd completed both his skin tones and his clothed areas. A good place to start, but not really representative of his overall look.

Today, I painted up his armour, and I ended up with a fantastic looking model if I do say so myself. Still a ways before being done, but a great proof of concept for this whole project.

The first area I painted was his chest armour. I really want to give these models that "Borderlands look" and that means being ok with dirt, age, wear, tear and brush strokes. It still has to be clean enough that it looks good though. So to achieve this, I start with a washed green base, then the same green but with less water to add darker streaks. Then I switch to a brownish-grey and ad more streaks... then BACK to the original green to cover and blend out the brown. As a final step, I use a light green thinned to a wash to highlight the armour. Even while highlighting and blending, I allow streaking and I'm careful to paint "with the grain" to keep its uniform appearance.

Once I've painted on all the green, this is what we have:

Not great yet, because while there's a lot of nice brushed green armour, there's no shading. Before we get to that though, I'm going to paint the trim so that I can shade them together.

my apologies for the photos... my camera is once again being stupid...

Next we have a before and after photo of the cell-shading (taken with my phone) which really shows where he's at.


Now, what do I mean by cell-shading? It's that rendering style that video games use to make their graphics look like cartoons. (Most notably the black out-lining around everything) I usually avoid shading with black washes these days, because a black shade tends to destroy colour. I prefer to use darker shades of the colour I'm painting.

However, this is the other aspect of that "borderlands style" - contrast. Borderlands has a bold look, and this is partly created by using light colours to fill space, and making them stand out by going very dark in the shadows and edges.

Close ups with my microscope let you see that I'm keeping the black wash just to crevices. Basically, I just used a fine brush and painted the black wash in, rather than the usual method of slapping a wash all over a surface.

As I said before, I think as of this step I'm happy with where things are headed... definitely a pleasing "proof of concept" step to move forward full steam ahead.

What do you think?

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With many thanks to MiniWarGaming and their crew for donating the miniatures that are being painted for this project.

Final figures will be auctioned off, all proceeds going to the Childs Play charity during the Headshots from the Heart marathon.